Glossary: E

The set of capacities needed to generate and disseminate timely and meaningful warning information to enable individuals, communities and organizations threatened by a hazard to prepare and to act appropriately and in sufficient time to reduce the...

A series of small- to intermediate-sized spacecraft that is the centerpiece of NASA's Earth Science Enterprise (ESE). Planned for launch beginning in 1999, each of the EOS spacecraft will carry a suite of instruments designed to study global climate...

The system that will manage a dataset of Earth science observations to be collected over a 15-year period. Existing data indicates that the Earth is changing, and that human activity increasingly contributes to this change. To monitor these changes...

A project that is responsible for providing scientific and other users access to data from NASA's Earth Science Enterprise. The ESDIS Project provides this access through the development and operation of the Earth Observing System (EOS) Data and...

The Earth regarded as a unified system of interacting components, including geosphere (land), atmosphere (air), hydrosphere (water and ice), and biosphere (life). Source: NASA (http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Glossary)

An integrated approach to the study of the Earth that stresses investigations of the interactions among the Earth's components in order to explain Earth dynamics, evolution, and global change. Source: NASA (http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Glossary)

One of six Keplerian elements, it describes the shape of an orbit. In the Keplerian orbit model, the satellite orbit is an ellipse, with eccentricity defining the 'shape' of the ellipse. When e=0, the ellipse is a circle. When e is very near 1, the...

A warming of the surface waters of the eastern equatorial Pacific that occurs at irregular intervals of 2-7 years, usually lasting 1-2 years. Along the west coast of South America, southerly winds promote the upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water...

Energy propagated as time-varying electric and magnetic fields. These two fields are inextricably linked as a single entity since time-varying electric fields produce time-varying magnetic fields and vice versa. Light and radar are examples of...

The entire range of radiant energies or wave frequencies from the longest to the shortest wavelengths--the categorization of solar radiation. Satellite sensors collect this energy, but what the detectors capture is only a small portion of the entire...

Method of travel for radiant energy (all energy is both particles and waves), so called because radiant energy has both magnetic and electrical properties. electromagnetic waves are produced when electric charges change their motion. Whether the...